Random thoughts while multitasking my way through life

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Monthly Archives: July 2012

The Olympic rings light up the stadium during the Opening Ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics

The opening ceremonies for the 2012 Summer Olympics were tonight and they were great. I totally love the Olympics and we make the opening and closing ceremonies into family events. We hung out with Gramma and had a fun time.

London put on a beautiful show, I loved seeing the scenes change through the periods of Great Britain’s history. There was a terrifically silly part with an orchestra playing the theme from Chariots of Fire. As silly as it was, I enjoyed this part with Rowan Atkinson.

My favorite part was the lighting and movement of the cauldron. It’s always an amazing sight that is quite moving.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for something to read and realized I had never finished reading a series of books. I had gotten the first book when I worked at Borders in the late 1990’s. The author had visited the store and I had gotten an autographed copy of her book. The autographed book disappeared, I think my sister borrowed it and then lent it to someone else. Slightly disappointing but not a huge deal in the whole scope of life. A couple of years ago I found book two and three on Amazon but book four was out of print. Last year, Sully bought me a few books off of my Amazon wish list after some fairly stressful weeks. Book four was one of the books that he ordered, he’d found a like new copy from a third party seller but fulfilled by Amazon.

I just finished the last book in this series and decided I would share them with my peeps here.

You can find these books on Amazon. They are currently out of print but a lot of out of print books have popped up recently on Amazon, Alibris and eBay. I am not going to add detailed reviews, just my own short description.

Set in Scotland, this book is a great combination of romance, mystery, and legend. Although it is a regency romance, there is very little fussing and gossiping of the ton. Most of the story is spent in the highlands of Scotland. I enjoyed the book, even on the second run around.

White Magic is the second installment of the White Series. This story is about the brother of the main character in book one. Another regency romance, this time set in London amongst the watchful eyes of the ton. This story has romance, of course, but mystery, mistaken identity and some small touches of feminism and science. Overall, this was another entertaining read.

This book is connected to the first two by the friendship of the main character in book three to the brothers in the first books. This book is set in both London and Scotland, the story is almost more mystery than romance. This story also leads right into the last book of the series.

This story actually begins at the end of book 3, with the sister of that book’s main character. This book is filled with mystery, romance and centuries old Scottish legend. There are a few unexpected twists and turns that pay off well at the end of the book.

We arrived home from vacation last night. It’s nice to be home but I could do without the heat.

All of our luggage needs to be unpacked and laundry needs to be done, but I have no motivation to do any of it. Of course, I drove all of the way home from Anaheim last night so I shouldn’t be surprised that I am so tired today. So far I have spent the day resting with scattered moments sorting and putting things away.

I’ve already had to deal with a minor issue in the garage. It’s pretty disheartening given all of the work I just did in there. I have a set of plastic drawers that stack. One set has two large file drawers, the other two sets have smaller drawers. Anyhow, the bottom section buckled at the bottom and made the whole stack lean and fall over. Luckily other boxes kept the stack from completely falling. At some point in time I need to go out and figure a solution. I might have to build a shelf for each section. There’s just too much to do right now and it’s really too hot to deal with it at this point. Maybe I will check it out over the weekend.

I am trying to stay positive and not let the heat of the never ending summer depress me. My plan for the rest of the week is to deal with things in little doses so that I don’t wear myself out. Here’s hoping that works.

We were excited to see the changes to the entrance to California Adventure as well as the Carsland.

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Here is the Oswald gas station on Buena Vista Street.

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Carsland!

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The lines were crazy for the rides, 180 minutes for the Radiator Springs Racers. That’s 2.5 hours! I couldn’t believe anyone would wait that long. Crazy!

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I was really happy to see the buildings in Radiator Springs.

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After, wandering around Carsland we grabbed lunch, rode the Monsters Inc. ride, did some final shopping and then headed out towards Downtown Disney. We shopped at World of Disney, Build A Bear and then RideMakerz. Boo got a Disney Exclusive Pirate Bear at BaB and Sully got a Mater at RideMakerz.

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I titled this “All roads lead to Disneyland” because for some reason when we try to leave Anaheim we always get turned around and end up heading back to Disneyland. It’s literally happened the last five times we’ve left Anaheim. Even using the GPS we’ve had issues, so now we don’t trust it and we end up going the wrong way. Seriously, talk about second guessing yourself. I am making notes for next time.

Today we are heading to Disneyland. We checked out of our hotel in Encinitas and drove up to Anaheim. We did a quick check in at the hotel. This is the same hotel we stayed at on our honeymoon and they upgraded us this time to an executive suite.

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And then off to Disneyland.

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There were a lot of people in the park. As a rule, we don’t normally go to Disneyland during the summer. Our normal Disneyland vacation time is during October/November or January/February. We had a pretty good day, we got on the rides that we wanted to ride and didn’t wait more than 30 minutes and mostly it was less than 20 minutes.

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.We had a fun time on the Jungle Cruise. In the afternoon, we left to go officially check in at the hotel and on the way out we stopped to upgrade our tickets to Annual Passports.

We got to the beach a little before 10 in the morning. We actually had great luck finding parking, which is always good. It was nice and sunny, not too hot with a nice breeze coming in off of the water.

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We had a super fantastic lunch at Harbor Fish.

We had a super fantastic lunch at Harbor Fish.

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It’s a small place with tiny tables and benches but the food is fantastic and we were sitting about 20 yards from the ocean.

We spent today with my brother. After meeting at his house we left to go hike Iron Mountain with my brother and his wife. It was an abbreviated hike though, that thing on the top of my foot, muscle, tendon, bone??? was killing me every time we walked uphill. It turned out to be a good thing though because it was a little too warm for my brother’s dogs.

We had a great day and they will be meeting us at the beach tomorrow morning. Yay!